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Dimmable LED’s
- Thread starter Woodster
- Start date
My experience is that dimming them is temperamental.
You usually need a leading edge dimmer not a normal tungsten lamp one....but sometimes a normal one will work...sometimes.
because the dimming involves cropping the waveform....in some way that doesn't make sense to me... you need a wattage rating based on the 'equivalent watts'. So 50W rating dimmer to dim a 5W LED lamp and so on.
There can be a minimum load as well as a maximum so 1 lamp on its own may not dim properly.
For our install of 17 x 7W LEDs on one circuit and 8 on a second circuit I ended up with a high power twin leading edge dimmer from toolstation (which they no longer sell). That was after trying a couple of 'led dimmers' and finding they didn't work because they were under rated at 250W for 17 x 7W lamps. the derating thing was hidden in the small print in the instructions and nowhere on the site I ended up returning it to.
That was all 5 plus years ago so maybe things have got better by now. Good luck!
You usually need a leading edge dimmer not a normal tungsten lamp one....but sometimes a normal one will work...sometimes.
because the dimming involves cropping the waveform....in some way that doesn't make sense to me... you need a wattage rating based on the 'equivalent watts'. So 50W rating dimmer to dim a 5W LED lamp and so on.
There can be a minimum load as well as a maximum so 1 lamp on its own may not dim properly.
For our install of 17 x 7W LEDs on one circuit and 8 on a second circuit I ended up with a high power twin leading edge dimmer from toolstation (which they no longer sell). That was after trying a couple of 'led dimmers' and finding they didn't work because they were under rated at 250W for 17 x 7W lamps. the derating thing was hidden in the small print in the instructions and nowhere on the site I ended up returning it to.
That was all 5 plus years ago so maybe things have got better by now. Good luck!
DaveL
Old Oak
The lamp you are trying to control needs to be a dimmable type, all of the lamps have a circuit to reduce the mains down to the correct voltage for the LEDs, some of them will not work on a dimmer as the electronics will try to run the lamp at full brightness or not at all.
yes i missed that bit out...all lamps need to be dimmable type.
HappyHacker
Sapling
A few years ago it was an absolute pain dimming LEDs, even the supposedly dimmable ones. Some would only work with certain dimmers, most would not work with dimmers not designed for LEDs some would flicker when dimmed even with the recommended dimmers.
Now it is slightly less of a pain as most dimmable LEDs will work with most LED dimmers most of the time.
Ideally you would get a dimmer that has an adjustment to set the minimum dimming level which does not cause flicker and that remembers it if there is a power cut. There is lots of choice now from cheap and cheerful to relatively expensive. Having had my fingers burnt on more than one occasion I do not make any recommendations.
Now it is slightly less of a pain as most dimmable LEDs will work with most LED dimmers most of the time.
Ideally you would get a dimmer that has an adjustment to set the minimum dimming level which does not cause flicker and that remembers it if there is a power cut. There is lots of choice now from cheap and cheerful to relatively expensive. Having had my fingers burnt on more than one occasion I do not make any recommendations.